A Book of Myths

Page: 106

“In Being’s floods, in Action’s storm,I walk and work, above, beneath,Work and weave in endless motion!Birth and Death,An infinite ocean;A seizing and givingThe fire of Living;’Tis thus at the roaring loom of Time I ply,And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.”

[Pg 216]
So speaks the Erdgeist in Goethe’s Faust, and yet
another of the greatest of the poets writes:

“The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains—Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see;But if we could see and hear, this Vision—were it not He?”

Tennyson.

Carlyle says that “The whole universe is the Garment
of God,” and he who lives very close to Nature
must, at least once in a lifetime, come, in the solitude of
the lonely mountain tops, upon that bush that burns and
is not yet consumed, and out of the midst of which
speaks the voice of the Eternal.

The immortal soul—the human body—united, yet
ever in conflict—that is Pan. The sighing and longing
for things that must endure everlastingly—the riotous
enjoyment of the beauty of life—the perfect appreciation
of the things that are. Life is so real, so strong, so full
of joyousness and of beauty,—and on the other side of a
dark stream, cold, menacing, cruel, stands Death. Yet
Life and Death make up the sum of existence, and until
we, who live our paltry little lives here on earth in the
hope of a Beyond, can realise what is the true air that is
played on those pipes of Pan, there is no hope for us of
even a vague comprehension of the illimitable Immortality.

It is a very old tale that tells us of the passing of
Pan. In the reign of Tiberius, on that day when, on
the hill of Calvary, at Jerusalem in Syria, Jesus Christ
[Pg 217]
died as a malefactor, on the cross—“And it was about
the sixth hour, and there was a darkness all over the
earth”—Thamus, an Egyptian pilot, was guiding a ship
near the islands of Paxæ in the Ionian Sea; and to him
came a great voice, saying, “Go! make everywhere the
proclamation, Great Pan is dead!”

And from the poop of his ship, when, in great heaviness
of heart, because for him the joy of the world seemed
to have passed away, Thamus had reached Palodes, he
shouted aloud the words that he had been told. Then,
from all the earth there arose a sound of great lamentation,
and the sea and the trees, the hills, and all the
creatures of Pan sighed in sobbing unison an echo of
the pilot’s words—“Pan is dead—Pan is dead.”

“Gods of Hellas, gods of Hellas,Can ye listen in your silence?Can your mystic voices tell usWhere ye hide? In floating islands,With a wind that evermoreKeeps you out of sight of shore?Pan, Pan is dead.

[Pg 218]Gods! we vainly do adjure you,—Ye return nor voice nor sign!Not a votary could secure youEven a grave for your Divine!Not a grave to show thereby,‘Here these grey old gods do lie,’Pan, Pan is dead.”

E. B. Browning.

Pan is dead. In the old Hellenistic sense Pan is
gone forever. Yet until Nature has ceased to be, the
thing we call Pan must remain a living entity. Some
there be who call his music, when he makes all humanity
dance to his piping, “Joie de vivre,” and De Musset
speaks of “Le vin de la jeunesse” which ferments “dans
les veines de Dieu.” It is Pan who inspires Seumas, the
old islander, of whom Fiona Macleod writes, and who,
looking towards the sea at sunrise, says, “Every
morning like this I take my hat off to the beauty of the
world.”

Half of the flesh and half of the spirit is Pan.
There are some who have never come into contact with
him, who know him only as the emblem of Paganism, a
cruel thing, more beast than man, trampling, with goat’s
feet, on the gentlest flowers of spring. They know not
the meaning of “the Green Fire of Life,” nor have they
ever known Pan’s moods of tender sadness. Never to
them has come in the forest, where the great grey trunks
of the beeches rise from a carpet of primroses and blue
hyacinths, and the slender silver beeches are the guardian
angels of the starry wood-anemones, and the sunbeams
slant through the oak and beech leaves of tender
green and play on the dead amber leaves of a year that
[Pg 219]
is gone, the whisper of little feet that cannot be seen, the
piercing sweet music from very far away, that fills the
heart with gladness and yet with a strange pain—the
ache of the Weltschmerz—the echo of the pipes of Pan.

“... Oftenest in the dark woods I hear him singDim, half-remembered things, where the old mosses clingTo the old trees, and the faint wandering eddies bringThe phantom echoes of a phantom spring.”

In every land, North and South, East and West, from
sea to sea, myth and legend hand down to us as cruel and
malignant creatures, who ceaselessly seek to slay man’s
body and to destroy his soul, the half-human children
of the restless sea and of the fiercely running streams.

In Scotland and in Australia, in every part of
Europe, we have tales of horrible formless things which
frequent lonely rivers and lochs and marshes, and
to meet which must mean Death. And equal in malignity
with them, and infinitely more dangerous, are the
beautiful beings who would seem to claim descent from
Lilith, the soulless wife of Adam.

Such were the sirens who would have compassed the
[Pg 221]
destruction of Odysseus. Such are the mermaids, to wed
with one of whom must bring unutterable woe upon any
of the sons of men. In lonely far-off places by the sea
there still are tales of exquisite melodies heard in the
gloaming, or at night when the moon makes a silver
pathway across the water; still are there stories of
women whose home is in the depths of the ocean, and
who come to charm away men’s souls by their beauty
and by their pitiful longing for human love.

Those who have looked on the yellow-green waters
of the Seine, or who have seen the more turbid, more
powerful Thames sweeping her serious, majestic way
down towards the open ocean, at Westminster, or at
London Bridge, can perhaps realise something of that
inwardness of things that made the people of the past,
and that makes the mentally uncontrolled people of the
present, feel a fateful power calling upon them to listen
to the insistence of the exacting waters, and to surrender
their lives and their souls forever to a thing that called
and which would brook no denial. In the Morgue, or
in a mortuary by the river-side, their poor bodies have
lain when the rivers have worked their will with them,
and “Suicide,” “Death by drowning,” or “By Misadventure”
have been the verdicts given. We live in
a too practical, too utterly common-sensical age to
conceive a poor woman with nothing on earth left to
live for, being lured down to the Shades by a creature
of the water, or a man who longs for death seeing a
beautiful daughter of a river-god beckoning to him to
come where he will find peace everlasting.

[Pg 222]
Yet ever we war with the sea. All of us know her
seductive charm, but all of us fear her. The boundary
line between our fear of the fierce, remorseless, ever-seeking,
cruel waves that lap up life swiftly as a thirsty
beast laps water, and the old belief in cruel sea-creatures
that sought constantly for the human things that were to
be their prey, is a very narrow one. And once we have
seen the sea in a rage, flinging herself in terrible anger
against the poor, frail toy that the hands of men have
made and that was intended to rule and to resist her,
foaming and frothing over the decks of the thing that
carries human lives, we can understand much of the old
pagan belief. If one has watched a river in spate, red
as with blood, rushing triumphantly over all resistance,
smashing down the trees that baulk it, sweeping away each
poor, helpless thing, brute or human, that it encounters,
dealing out ruin and death, and proceeding superbly on
to carry its trophies of disaster to the bosom of the
Ocean Mother, very easy is it to see from whence came
those old tales of cruelty, of irresistible strength, of
desire.